laith al rakty

laith Abu rakty

Year of graduation: 2012

Current position: Co-Founder & CTO of Snapcart

Since early childhood and throughout my teenage years, I developed a huge passion for everything and anything computer-related. I was still 14 when I started teaching myself the basics of programming through e-books and managed to sell my first website at the age of 16. In AIU, I found a very positive atmosphere to further develop my skills. Up-to-date materials, supportive teachers and a challenging environment that pushed my knowledge further in leaps and bounds. Upon graduation, I worked in Dubai for a while and then moved to Indonesia. During the period when I arrived, Indonesia’s economy was undergoing quick expansion. The e-commerce field peaked my interest immediately due to the high demand on consumer services. I started out in a regional e-commerce company leading their mobile development team. Then, a year later I moved to an early-stage e-commerce start-up where I spent two years managing their tech team and saw the company expanded from 10 to 100 employees which was a valuable learning experience on growing startups. After working on the operational side for a while, I moved to Ardent Capital, a renowned venture capital in Southeast Asia, as a VP of Engineering. My experience here was paramount in shaping my understanding of how venture capitals evaluate and assess startups. Through my work in e-commerce companies, I noticed that collecting analytics on online purchases was a trivial matter. On the other hand, analytics on offline purchases required a rigorous and time-consuming process while in Southeast Asia they account for more than 90% of the market compared to online purchases. To tackle that, in Sept. 2015, I went on with two partners to create Snapcart, a mobile application that gives shoppers cashbacks for scanning their receipts while we collect the purchase data and turn it into analytics that we offer to brands on a real-time basis. The company was met with huge success and within a few months we secured $1.6 million pre-Series A funding. Soon after that, we expanded into Philippines. As of March 2017, our app was downloaded 1 million times, our team grew to 70 people and we are in the process of expanding to more countries.